(This is an entirely speculative post.)
Huge supermarket chain, Tesco, shut down 14 stores over the weekend due to security issues. Here are some brief details from The Guardian:
Link: Tesco back to normal after alert | UK Latest | Guardian Unlimited
Trading returned to normal at Tesco after a security alert forced 14 stores to close across the UK.
Police are investigating who is responsible for the “series of threats” that led to the evacuation to hundreds of thousands of customers.Eyewitnesses claimed they had been told of a bomb scare, while reports ranged from a financial motive to threats by the animal rights lobby.
Now, here’s what’s rather curious. An SMS Text News reader was sat in a pub at the weekend with his friends when the friend got a phone call on his mobile from a withheld number.
His friend answered. It was a lady he didn’t know and the call was completely out of the blue.
The lady proceeded to tell the friend that…
all tescos were closing cause of the scare and not to worry but it was a precautionary thing
The friend was mystified. He said thank you and hung up, entirely confused. Weird.
The SMS Text News reader speculates that this could have been a new kind of campaigning — ‘direct to consumer’. Get a list of mobile numbers — or randomly dial them — and attempt to create panic. How effective this could be if used widely, I don’t know. Although it would, I imagine, be rather challenging to engage an outbound call centre for this.
Would be very easy with a Text-to-Speech application. As long as enough people thought it was genuine, the effect would be the same.
Guess this is on the same lines as the Vishing campaigns where an automated system phones you claiming to be from your credit card company and asks you to type in your number, expiry, etc to confirm you are the correct person before ‘passing you onto a representative’.
We live in a world where nothing can be trusted.
Trust no-one and to (mis-)quote the late Cobain, ‘just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to you’.
Off to lie in a metal-lined, darkened room for several years!
Could it have been pre-recorded in which case it could have been an app randomly dialling mobile numbers via the internet?